Friday, Jul 4, 2008
French authorities alerted the FBI in August that the "20th hijacker" had trained in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, according to an intelligence expert -- but the U.S. did nothing.
May 23, 2002 | Who knew what, and when? Could the FBI have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks?
The New York Times fueled this fiery debate Tuesday by revealing that high-level FBI officials received -- but never acted on -- a July 2001 intelligence memo from the bureau's Phoenix field office, in which agents expressed concern about possible al-Qaida contacts who were studying at American aviation schools. Then, "a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks," the Times revealed, FBI director Robert Mueller III and Attorney General John Ashcroft learned of the memo but never briefed the White House.
But a pair of French authors says that the FBI bungled more than the Phoenix memo. In "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth," Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie alleged that the Clinton and Bush administrations went easy on al-Qaida before Sept. 11 to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia and to continue to bargain with the Taliban over a Central Asian oil pipeline. They also assert that the negotiations broke off after the U.S. threatened to attack the Taliban unless it agreed to U.S. demands, perhaps precipitating the 9/11 attacks.
The book was a bestseller in France, but got little play here. Now the U.S. edition is coming out in July, with an explosive new chapter written by Brisard, who is the former deputy director of business intelligence for the French conglomerate Vivendi Universal and the author of the first intelligence report on al-Qaida's financial networks. In it, Brisard asserts that French intelligence officials warned their U.S. counterparts in considerable detail about al-Qaida's ties to Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker, but the U.S. failed to act on the information.
The U.S. arrested Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, on a visa violation in August, after he raised suspicions at a flight school where he was training. But officials say they were unable to link him to the Sept. 11 plot beforehand, or even confirm that he was tied to al-Qaida. Although some intelligence agents suspected a link with al-Qaida, officials have insisted an aggressive investigation was hampered by guidelines that limit what the agencies can do without clear evidence a suspect is dangerous. But Brisard says top French intelligence sources told him that they provided the U.S. with specific information about Moussaoui's al-Qaida links, including the fact that he had trained in Afghanistan camps and had ties to the terror network's members. Despite this, U.S. intelligence did not connect Moussaoui to al-Qaida until after Sept. 11.
The FBI refused to comment on Brisard's allegations. "We can't corroborate or verify anything," says a bureau spokesperson.
In an e-mail interview with Salon, Brisard discussed the French information about Moussaoui and how the FBI missed so many clues about al-Qaida's plans in the weeks before Sept. 11.
You've hinted that politics and oil interests trumped law enforcement when it came to al-Qaida before Sept. 11. There's also some evidence the U.S. missed intelligence signals. But your Moussaoui revelations are more explosive than what came before. What did you learn?
The case of Zacarias Moussaoui was a typical missed signal. But it also reveals a cultural difference between the way the U.S. and other countries use intelligence. The French citizen was arrested in the United States on Aug. 17, 2001 -- less than a month before the attacks -- for visa violations, and he turned out to have been enrolled since February 2001 in a flight school in Oklahoma, training to be the 20th hijacker. Officially, however, neither the FBI nor the CIA had sufficient evidence to allow them to interrogate Moussaoui before the attacks, they say. The European intelligence services, notably the French, had already alerted the FBI to the Moussaoui case, at least once in August 2001 -- but the information sent, according to the Americans, was insufficient to put him under surveillance.
In a new chapter for the U.S. version of the book, however, I reveal that in late August, French antiterrorism services alerted the Americans to Moussaoui and passed on unambiguous intelligence, leaving, at least in the minds of the French, few doubts as to the suspect's terrorist links. It was shown to the Americans that Moussaoui had traveled to Afghanistan, that he was trained in 1998 in a camp controlled by al-Qaida and that a strong possibility existed that he had been in contact with members of its network in Europe. Another 20-page document that includes an interrogation of his brother, which confirms this information, was later sent to the American services. So, nearly one month before the Sept. 11 attacks, or at least since the arrest of Moussaoui on Aug. 17, the U.S. authorities had two fundamental pieces of evidence before them: They knew that the suspect apprehended on American soil was linked to the al-Qaida network, which in itself should have been cause enough for prompt serious investigations; and they knew that he had taken part in flying lessons for civil aircraft.
In other words, they'd been informed that a terrorist from al-Qaida was training to fly civil aircraft in the United States. Was the response of the FBI before Sept. 11 appropriate? Could they have acted differently? The fact is Moussaoui was held at an Immigration and Naturalization Service location in Minneapolis and wasn't transferred to FBI custody until after Sept. 11.
What is at issue is the method of data processing. Intelligence is a business of gathering facts. Some might come to the conclusion that the information provided by the Europeans was "insufficient" to signal an immediate threat, while others would have taken the necessary measures to erase the slightest doubt or at least would have taken the time to analyze and confirm all suspicions. For their part, the French believe that placed in the same situation as their counterparts, they would have registered and investigated this information, however fragmentary. And the fact that the FBI tried to obtain a special surveillance warrant [to examine the hard drive of Moussaoui's computer] as part of an antiterrorist procedure proves that some of their agents were taking seriously the intelligence collected on Moussaoui. To miss a low signal is admissible; to fail to integrate in the law-enforcement system as loud a signal as the Moussaoui one is a major failure.
How much do you know about why the FBI wasn't allowed to investigate him more? Supposedly FBI agents tried to start an investigation but someone -- possibly Ashcroft -- denied approval for wiretap. Do you know anything about this?
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